So much for snowflaking this week.

Well, I reported a few days ago that I was psyched to have close to $50 left in my food budget. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. We hit a little snag in our menu this week. Our youngest son was diagnosed at the doctor's office with more severe allergies than we realized. I knew he was allergic to milk, but felt he was likely allergic to something else due to his breakouts. But I could not figure out what it was so we had him tested.

We saw the allergist yesterday and they performed the skin test right away. It appears he is not only severely allergic to milk, but also corn and soy! His condition is pretty bad in that the ordered us to always keep an Epipen around. We also had blood work done to back it up. She explained some things to me about allergies and it is truly important that I eliminate all this from his diet with a hope of introducing to him in about 3-5 years. Our hope is that his memory cells will have died off and he will no longer have reactions to such food. The key to to this is really removing it from his diet as much as possible.

I was feeding the kid lots of soy milk since he was allergic to milk. However, we recently switched him to rice milk and I did notice a slight improvement in his conditions.

But now I must add soy and corn to our eliminated food list. When we say corn, we mean anything with corn.....that includes High Fructose Corn Syrup! Which is in practically everything!

Also, when you find a product that is milk free it almost always contains soy! If you find something that does not have soy it contains corn. I told my husband I imagine it will cost close to 15.00 a week for his special foods.

Tonight I am experimenting with some homemade bread that does not contain corn, soy or milk. I replaced the butter with olive oil so we will see how it turns out. We have a health food store nearby and I plan to go there soon and see what they offer as far as products for this diet.

When we discovered what all he could not have I went to the store to replace a few of our more common foods for him. I purchased some extra fruit for the week, buckwheat pancake mix and pure maple syrup for breakfasts, and also a few minor snack items. Some special pretzels, honey flavored post cereal and orange juice.

Tonight our menu called for a special Chinese dish--Sweet/n/sour Chicken. This has soy sauce and corn ingredients. So I cooked his chicken separate, put no butter in the rice, and gave him carrots as a side.

So needless to say this unexpected shopping spree took all my extra money I had planned to snowflake. But I am still within my budget of $250.00. I really hope to simply not go over that budget or I will simply feel like such a failure.